Come Clean, Summer Breeze (Part 2)

[shineemod_y]

Part 1

“Gotcha,” she said before she stepped back to fetch her beer. Taeyeon watched her as she poured the content of the bottle in the huge glass, and she saw her lips moving along to the words of the song that was currently playing. It was in English, and it got Taeyeon thinking: did Jungah speak English? Had she studied somewhere else, maybe, like Baekhee? How old was she, even?

She was a little startled when Jungah placed the glass of beer on the bar in front of her.

“Here you go,” the bartender said, smiling.

“Thanks,” Taeyeon told her, and as she grabbed the handle of the glass, Jungah spoke to her again.

“Hey,” Jungah started, and Taeyeon looked up at her, humming with her lips against the rim of her glass as she took a sip. “So, what brought you here? Work?” Taeyeon shook her head, and Jungah cocked her head to the side in a thoughtful gesture. “Vacation?”

“It’s a long story,” Taeyeon said, trying to wave the bartender off.

“It’s a long night,” Jungah insisted, an interested spark in her eyes. “Come on. I’m curious; and your answer only made me more curious. If you had just told me you were here on vacation I would’ve been satisfied, probably. But now that I know that it’s a long story…”

“Actually, it is kind of for vacation,” Taeyeon cut her off, “Seoul was too much and there were way too many things going on at once. I felt like I needed… To breathe, somehow.”

“I get you,” Jungah said. “Here it’s a great place for recovering your breath. It’s been around a week since you got here, right? And you were heading to the beach by yourself-a big yikes. A dead giveaway that you were feeling stressed over something. Are you feeling better yet?”

Taeyeon just looked at the woman across the bar with slight disbelief mixed with embarrassment. “How do you remember that? How do you remember me so well?”

“You’re just hard to forget, I guess,” Jungah told her in a quite cheeky manner, and she actually winked at her.

Taeyeon didn’t say anything in response. She just focused on her beer again, and luckily, Jungah was soon also entertained with mixing drinks for other customers.

She couldn’t remember the last time someone had told her something like that. But it was somewhat surprising even to herself - the line the woman behind the bar had told her, despite being overused, only elicited surprise and something akin to amusement inside of her. Was she really hard to forget? Taeyeon didn’t have a bad self-esteem, but she wasn’t overconfident either - it was impossible that every person she had ever interacted with could remember her.

But Jungah really seemed to remember her.

As she sipped from her beer she saw the other woman working, and she realized something - all of the patrons were required to pay before they received their drink, but Taeyeon hadn’t paid for her beer yet.

She frowned a little, confused, and when Jungah seemed relatively free again, she made a gesture at her to get her to approach her.

“Yes?” The other girl said after approaching her with graceful steps that matched the beat of whatever song was playing. She was smiling brightly, and Taeyeon would be annoyed by how nice the other girl was being to her if her smile wasn’t so bright and contagious.

“How much for the beer?” She asked her, simply, and Jungah laughed, waving her hand dismissively.

“I told you last time, I think- this place won’t miss one or two beers. Consider this the second beer I was going to give you the other day, okay? You don’t owe me a thing,” Jungah told her, but Taeyeon, forever stubborn, wasn’t satisfied.

“Honestly, I’m really grateful, but you have no reason to just give me stuff for free if I can pay for it,” Taeyeon tried reasoning with her, but the girl just rolled her eyes and smiled as she leaned over the surface of the bar.

“I do have a reason, though,” she told Taeyeon, and while Taeyeon looked right back at her eyes wandered to a pendant that was hanging from a thin, worn leather strap tied around her neck. She hadn’t seen it before, but it caught her attention with the way it glistened under the lights of the bar and reflected them subtly. It was metallic, most likely made of steel or silver, and shaped like a ballerina. It was beautiful - the ballerina appeared to be floating, suspended in the air, with her leg lifted in an arabesque. Taeyeon started to wonder if Jungah danced, or if she was only wearing that pendant because she thought it was pretty, even though it didn’t match her cherry-shaped earrings at all. The way she walked was so graceful, though, like the foam of the ocean swaying gently - that manner of walking could only belong to a dancer.

The voice of the other girl interrupted her before she could think too much about the topic, though. “I want to be your friend, and friends do nice things for each other. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

“I guess it is, but still,” Taeyeon insisted, looking away from the ballerina and at Jungah’s eyes instead. “Why do you want to be my friend?”

Jungah shrugged, “no particular reason,” she said simply, but then she smirked a little. “Though I can’t deny that the fact that you’re hot and beautiful probably has something to do with it...”

Taeyeon rolled her eyes, “there you go again.”

“Oh, but I do mean it!” Jungah said, and Taeyeon felt her eyes looking at her, scanning her face attentively.

“Do you, really?” Taeyeon found herself replying, feeling her cheeks heat up under the other woman’s intense gaze. She didn’t look away, though - she actually looked right back at her, even if she fidgeted with her glass, tapping her fingers against the smooth, cold surface. “Cause I got the feeling it’s all just a marketing technique; flatter clients to get them to come back.”

“Oh, dear, I don’t need to flatter anyone to come back in such a small city. Trust me, I know the faces of at least eighty-five percent of the clientele. They always come back”

“But what about that other fifteen percent, then? Do you flirt with them?” Taeyeon asked, though the word she used felt strange in her mouth.

‘Flirting’.

Getting free drinks for someone, chatting them up, telling them repeatedly how beautiful they are - Taeyeon knew what flirting was even if it had been a while since she had experienced it without being annoyed by the person attempting to flirt with her.

(“Hey, beautiful,” some random dude at a club told her when she made her way towards the bar to get a new round of drinks for her friends and herself. She had lost a round of the game they had been playing in their booth, and the punishment required her to get the drinks.

It had been a little over a year ago, and it hadn’t been the first or the last time it had happened to her, but it wasn’t like it made a difference when or where. The memories of different clubs and bars had started to get blurry and mixed up, and it’s not like she ever cared to remember the faces of those guys.

“Are you here all alone?” He had asked her, unsurprisingly. “Do you want me to get you a drink?”

She had rolled her eyes and tried to ignore him, but she had felt his eyes running over the front of her body as she ordered the drinks for her friends. He was shameless about it, and he even dared move closer to her, his elbow propped on the bar while with his other hand he reached for Taeyeon’s hip before she could do anything to stop him.

“Hey, pretty, I’m talking to you,” he said, insistently, his nasty hand following the curve of the small of her back. Taeyeon snapped, stepping away from him, the disgusting warmth of the man’s hand slowly dissipating.

“Don’t touch me, you asshole,” Taeyeon spat out, finally looking at him with her eyes narrowed. She was considerably shorter and smaller than the man, but she didn’t care.

In the end, he had stopped bothering her but only because Minho had spotted the incident from their table and went up to Taeyeon to make it known that she was with someone.

Or, the way the dude saw it, that she was someone’s.

“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know she was your girl,” the dude had told Minho, putting his hands up innocently.)

Jungah shook her head.

“I do not, but I guess you have no reason to believe me,” Jungah told her with a little dramatic sigh. “Okay, I should probably go back to serving tables now. I can only get away with being in the bar for so long. But just tell me if you want something else, okay?”

Just like the previous time, Taeyeon couldn’t stop herself from stealing glances at Jungah as she worked around the bar, carrying drinks and all kinds of food in trays through the narrow spaces left between the tables and the seats.

But unlike the previous time, Taeyeon didn’t leave as soon as she finished her beer.

She stayed longer, ordered a couple of drinks (which she was only able to pay for herself after a lot of insistence), and chatted not only with Jungah, whenever the black-haired girl happened to have a few free minutes, but also with Byun Baekhee - the girl that had convinced her to visit The Wave for the first time.

Naturally, the other girls couldn’t keep her company all the time, but Taeyeon was okay with that. She had fun just casually talking to them whenever she got the opportunity, and they even exchanged phone numbers after Taeyeon told them she was about to leave, feeling buzzed after one beer and two cocktails.

“I know your friend has lived here for two years already, but you could still use a real Yeosu Expert in your life, at least for the time being,” Baekhee told Taeyeon as she added her in Kakao Talk. “And some day when we don’t have to work, we could totally hang out together! If you’re up for it, of course.”

“It sounds good,” she had told her, and she had meant it. “I’d love it, actually.”

“Text me when you get home, okay?” Jungah had told her, watching amusedly as Taeyeon struggled with the strap of her purse as she put it on. She was so tipsy that they had called an Uber for her even if Jinki’s house wasn’t far away.

“Okay,” Taeyeon responded, and when their eyes met after she had finished crossing the purse over her chest, Taeyeon couldn’t help but smile. “Thank you for putting up with me even if I’m nothing but a lonely city girl.”

Jungah shook her head, and she fixed the strap of Taeyeon’s purse (although the brunette was sure that despite the haze of the alcohol she had put it on properly) with one of her hands.

“Oh please,” the taller girl said, and was torn between looking down at her hand and at her face. In the end, Taeyeon looked up, and she couldn’t help but smile when she saw Jungah’s warm grin. The black-haired girl brought one of her hands to Taeyeon’s cheek, and she patted it gently with her fingers. “You’re way more than that. See you soon, Lee Taeyeon.”

☁ ☁ ☁ ☁ ☁

Soon turned out to be just the following day.

Taeyeon found that she had had so much fun that she couldn’t wait to repeat the previous night again.

But before heading to the bar, she went to the beach in the afternoon and spent a few hours there.

The day had been very warm and particularly clear, so she very much preferred to bask a little bit under the sun than staying locked in in Jinki’s and Sunyoung’s living room when she had the entire Pacific Ocean to herself.

She took a book (some novel Jonghyun hadn’t shut up about and that had been collecting dust in her old apartment for the past year), her earphones, a pair of tupperwares with fruit, and a beach towel, and for hours she did nothing but enjoy herself at the beach.

When the sun had started to fall and she hadn’t been able to read anymore, she had gotten up from her towel, put her beach bag over her shoulder, and taken a stroll along the shoreline.

She had left her shoes, her towel, and her shirt behind, and the foamy water tickled her feet whenever a wave crashed against the sand and climbed up the beach. Taeyeon didn’t bother on running away and just let herself enjoy the feeling of the salty bubbles bursting against her skin.

When the sun had started to set on the hills behind the beach and the people had long started leaving the beach, she got up from her towel and decided that it was a good time to head to the bar.

(And for some reason, the idea of seeing Kim Jungah and her bright smile again made her feel a little funny inside.)

The problem was that she had also taken Jinki’s and Sunyoung’s beach parasol with her, and she had no choice but to carry it around with her until she went home.

She supposed she could have just gone home to drop it off and maybe even take a shower to get the sand and the salt off her body and her hair, but she was feeling lazy.

Baekhee laughed loudly when she saw all the stuff that Taeyeon was carrying, and that she obviously intended to take the huge parasol into the bar with her.

“I see you had a beach day! Very nice, very nice! Hope you didn’t fall asleep under the sun, though- you’ll get nasty tan lines if you do.” The red-haired girl had said as energetically as always when she saw her. As usual, she was outside the bar for the first few hours of the night, a number of menus under her arm ready to be handed out at by passers who were most likely already familiar with the bar. “Where are you planning on putting that parasol, though?”

Taeyeon shrugged, “I don’t really know… Outside, maybe? If it’s possible… I just didn’t feel like going back home only to leave this and then come back…”

Baekhee clicked her tongue and waved her free hand at her. “Don’t worry about it, I know the perfect solution- hey, Jungah!” She exclaimed, turning her head to call into the bar. “Give us a hand, will you?”

In a matter of seconds, Jungah came out from inside the bar.

She looked as beautiful as always, though this time she was wearing a deep purple shade of lipstick. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail, and once again, she was using cherry-shaped earrings that would have contrasted awfully against the elegant shade of lipstick on anyone else. The combo seemed to fit Jungah extremely well, though.

“Lee Taeyeon!” She said, her grin as bright as the light of the streetlamp that shone above them. Taeyeon returned it almost instantaneously. Jungah’s eyes lowered, and Taeyeon caught them running over her.

Instead of annoying her, she only wished that Jungah still thought she was pretty despite not looking as presentable as the other times she had seen her.

She had just come from a day at the beach, after all, and Taeyeon had no qualms in bathing in the sea. Her brown hair was pulled up in a messy bun that most likely smelled like sea salt, and Taeyeon was sure that the itchiness she felt on her scalp was sand. Her shorts were quite decent, she supposed, but her wet bikini had soaked her shirt a little bit, not only making the pastel yellow appear one shade darker, but also doing nothing to hide the blue bikini she was wearing underneath.

Jungah didn’t say anything, though, but when she finished scanning Taeyeon’s body she just smiled warmly at her as if she hadn’t just blatantly checked her out. “What do you need help with? Are you gonna stay for a few drinks tonight as well? I’m glad you came!”

Taeyeon was about to explain to the black-haired woman what she needed help with when Baekhee interrupted her.

“Taeyeonnie here was wondering if she can put her huge parasol in your truck for the time being,” the red-haired girl said. “She’s too lazy to go back to her friend’s house!”

“Hey!” Taeyeon said, a bit embarrassed that Baekhee was making her seem so casual and inconsiderate. “That’s not really-“

“-Sure thing,” Jungah said, a relaxed expression on her face. Almost in the same breath, she turned towards Taeyeon. “Nice day at the beach?”

“Yeah, it was very good,” she replied, nodding, a bit surprised by how readily Jungah had accepted. She supposed she should stop being surprised by people’s kindness.

“Nice, you can tell me more about it later, okay?” Jungah said. Then she turned to Baekhee again. “We go right away, right?”

“Yup, unless you want to keep her standing here with her parasol the entire evening,” she said, and Taeyeon thought she saw her winking at Jungah. “Go, go.”

“Okay, unnie,” Jungah said, and she shoved her hand inside one of her pockets and pulled out a set of keys with a rubber keychain. It was the logo of a car brand, but it was very old and the colors had almost completely faded away. The black-haired girl reached for Taeyeon’s arm with her free hand, and even though she only gave her a soft squeeze, the gesture sent a pleasant kind of warmth across Taeyeon’s body. “Come on.”

Jungah started walking down the street and Taeyeon followed her closely, falling into step with her.

It was nice, for some reason - walking by somebody’s side was always pleasant, but Jungah’s presence was as comforting as a willow tree, its branches swaying by a sparkling river.

“It was Baekhee-ssi’s idea to use your truck, by the way,” Taeyeon informed the other girl. “I didn’t even know you had a truck.”

“It’s okay,” Jungah assured her with a chuckle. “It’s an old thing… I pretty much only use it to drive the both of us to work.”

“Oh, cool,” Taeyeon said, a little haunted by the realization that she had never learned how to drive. It had never been necessary in the big city where the subway or a bus can take you anywhere. “You guys live far away from here?”

Jungah shook her head.

“She lives near the city center with her husband and her mother,” she explained as they walked down the street past different shops, cars parked on the side of the road, and people taking relaxed strolls down the sidewalk. “He’s the best... His name is Kim Jongdae, and he sometimes sings in the bar. It’s even better when they sing together- you will meet him for sure!”

“Oh, he sounds cool,” Taeyeon said, and if she didn’t sound too excited it was because she was surprised. She hadn’t expected Baekhee to be married. “But what about you, then? Where do you live, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t mind you asking,” Jungah replied as they turned around the corner to a quieter, less crowded street. There were less cars on the road, and even though there were still plenty of small shops, they were considerably smaller. “I live, like… Three blocks away from here. I technically could walk home, but I like using my truck... I started driving her because I felt like I owed her something at first, but now I just do it because I like it. And because I got used to it, too.”

“Owed her? What do you mean?” Taeyeon asked, intrigued.

“Oh, haven’t I told you before? I thought you knew- The Wave is her place,” the taller girl said, and Taeyeon hummed, surprised, her eyes widening at the new bit of information. Again, she would have never guessed. “Well, hers and her older brother’s, but her older brother does most of the administrative bits so we don’t see him around much. When they got the place five years ago, unnie offered me a job despite me being… Well, a little inexperienced, so to say. She was doing me a huge favor... I was twenty years old then, and I had never had a job like that before.”

Taeyeon listened to Jungah so attentively she didn’t even fully process that they had already reached the other girl’s car - an old and battered white pick-up truck that had seen its best days in the eighties, when the roads of the city were still mostly made of dirt instead of concrete. Even then, Taeyeon’s father had told her, Gangnam and most of the south of the Han river were nearly rural localities. Back then, trucks like the one Jungah owned made sense. But in present day Seoul, and even in present day Yeosu, such a car appeared as a relic.

“I see… That was very kind of her, then. To help you out like that…!” Taeyeon said as Jungah took the parasol from her and placed it on the pickup of the truck. “Hold on, did you say you were twenty years old back then?”

“Yup,” Jungah said, nodding. “Which means now I’m twenty-five; turned twenty-five in January”

“Oh, guess I’m older than you then,” Taeyeon announced. “I’m also twenty-five, but I turn twenty-six in July,” she told the other girl with a chuckle. “In Korean age, I’m one year older than you, aren’t I?”

Jungah rolled her eyes, but it was in good nature, and the small laughter that left her lips betrayed her. “I suppose so, unnie.”

They headed back to the bar together, talking about everything and nothing in particular, and when Taeyeon spotted Baekhee outside of the bar, chatting up a couple of tourists and insistently shoving a menu at them, she couldn’t help but smile.

Jungah and Taeyeon talked almost all night.

The black-haired girl served tables, alright, but most of the time she spent behind the bar, chatting and joking and laughing and flirting with Taeyeon.

Taeyeon flirted right back, sometimes.

After two Cubalibres, she even dared touch the strap of leather that was tied around Jungah’s neck and that held the tiny silver ballerina in place. She traced the material, but also the soft skin of Jungah’s tan neck.

“Do you dance?” Taeyeon asked, and maybe it was the alcohol playing with her senses, but she thought she could feel Jungah shivering, her pulse palpitating under her fingers.

“I used to,” the black-haired girl said, pulling back from Taeyeon’s touch, but placing her hand on the brunette’s to guide it to the surface of the bar. “Why?” She asked, almost cautiously.

“I am a dancer,” Taeyeon said, trying not to give herself much importance. Suddenly, Jungah being a dancer -at least once upon a time- was the most fascinating thing she had ever heard. She had had the inkling that she danced, but knowing for sure was a completely different thing. Why had she stopped, though? Taeyeon could tell by the other girl’s movements that she had the grace, the delicacy, the refinement necessary to impress the entire world. She wanted to keep on holding her hand, but Jungah let go in favor of washing a glass. “Why did you stop, though…?”

“It’s a long story,” Jungah answered, looking down at the glass she was washing with a little inconspicuous smile. It didn’t reach her eyes, though, and that fact made Taeyeon frown.

“It’s a long night,” the brunette said, echoing the words Jungah had used on her just the previous night. The younger looked up at her, and her expression was sad; solemn, almost. Taeyeon bit her lip, feeling like she had pried too much. She remembered exactly how she felt like when Jungah asked what she was doing in Yeosu. “Sorry, it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you,” Jungah said, returning to her task. “Just not now.”

Taeyeon accepted that.

Jungah offered to drive Taeyeon to her house after the bar closed at two in the morning, and Taeyeon readily accepted. She texted Jinki, though, to tell him that she would be home later than usual, but that at least she had someone to drive her.

(She felt like a teenager by doing that.)

Taeyeon was more than a little sleepy (and tipsy) by the time the bar closed, and while Jungah, Baekhee, and the other workers cleaned up the tables and the floors of the place she half snoozed, half drunk-texted Jonghyun, who was always awake at the oddest hours of the night due to his sleeping problems.

It was almost three in the morning when they were ready to go, sitting in Jungah’s truck.

The seats were actually just one single seat that stretched along the cabin, so while Jungah sat in front of the steering wheel and Baekhee on the other window, Taeyeon had no choice but to sit between the two of them. Thankfully, the interior was quite spacious, so she had no trouble stretching her legs.

Jungah took Baekhee home first, saying something about how she had to return to Dolsan afterwards anyway, which meant it was more convenient for her to drop Taeyeon off afterwards.

It was a blurry ride - Taeyeon remembers laughing at the archaic music player in Jungah’s truck, but also feeling nostalgic as she went through the small collection of cassettes the younger woman kept in the dashboard compartment. She remembers Baekhee belting out to some song by S.E.S., the windows rolled down, and the sea breeze flooding the car as they crossed the bridge to get to the center of the city. The bridge was illuminated, and the colors danced even behind Taeyeon’s eyelids when she closed her eyes.

She must have dozed off at some point, because the next time she opened her eyes the colors were gone. All there was was the slightly yellow light of the streetlamp on Jinki and Sunyoung’s street.

Baekhee wasn’t there anymore, but Taeyeon was still close to Jungah.

Very close.

Her cheek was resting over the younger girl’s shoulder, actually, and as soon as she realized that fact she sat up straight and scooted away from Jungah on the seat.

“Oh my god,” she said, but the slur in her own words made her laugh for some reason. “I fell asleep!”

“Yes you did!” Jungah nodded, chuckling. “I would’ve woken you up, but you seemed very comfortable and I didn’t want to disturb you…”

Taeyeon laughed some more, shaking her head in disbelief. “I’m so sorry…! I didn’t want to inconvenience you…”

Jungah waved her hand dismissively at her. “It’s okay! You totally didn’t inconvenience me. You looked so cute sleeping, it was like you did me a favor, letting me be your pillow.”

“You are a comfy one,” Taeyeon told Jungah, not really thinking twice. “A very comfy and cute one. Thank you, though I’m still a little embarrassed.”

Jungah grinned and shrugged. “Don’t be.”

Taeyeon couldn’t help but smile as she looked at the other girl.

She doesn’t know for how long she stayed there, but she remembers it was Jungah who reminded her that they had reached her home.

The black-haired girl even helped her get the parasol from the pick-up of her truck, and she didn’t leave until Taeyeon was inside Jinki’s and Sunyoung’s house.

Taeyeon fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched her pillow, covered in sand and sea salt, her hair sticky and messed up due to the exposure to water and wind, and a pain on her cheeks that came from smiling and laughing too much.

☁ ☁ ☁ ☁ ☁

On Sunday afternoon, a few hours after lunch, Taeyeon received a text from Jungah asking her if she would like to join her and her dogs for a walk.

She didn’t have to think much about it - she said yes almost instantly, to which Jungah replied with a celebratory sticker.

“That outfit is a little too nice for walking dogs, don’t you think?” Jinki told her when he spotted her fixing her hair in the mirror at the entrance, a glass of lemonade in his hand and a playful smirk in his face.

“I like dressing nice,” Taeyeon defended herself, although she was unable to stop a sheepish smile from making its way to her face. She had put a little bit of extra effort in her appearance, although she wasn’t willing to admit it not even to herself. She had gone for a cute peach-colored sundress that fell a few centimeters over her knees, and she had even gone through the bother of curling her hair a little bit, so that it looked wavy instead of pin-straight. “And I like dogs.”

“I don’t doubt that,” her friend said, but his smirk didn’t leave his face. Taeyeon rolled her eyes good naturedly.

When Taeyeon made it to their agreed spot, Jungah was already there, along with three dogs.

Taeyeon saw her from across the street, and her breath caught in her throat at how beautiful she looked. Only then she realized that she had only ever seen Jungah wearing the black polo shirt from the bar she worked at, and only ever with her hair pulled up.

This time she was wearing denim shorts and a slightly oversized white t-shirt with some graphic pattern on the front, which was tucked inside of her shorts. Her legs were miles and miles of tan skin that contrasted against her white Converse low-tops, and Taeyeon couldn’t help but wonder how soft her skin would feel under her fingers. Her hair was loose, too, flowing in the soft breeze that came from the sea.

She was focused on her dogs, though - on keeping them still, which was probably a difficult task. They were most likely excited and impatient, wanting to get their walk started, but they couldn’t understand why their owner was just standing in the same spot. As Taeyeon crossed the street she heard Jungah talking to them and shushing them, telling them to stay still, and Taeyeon couldn’t help but laugh.

“So, these are Monggu, Jjanggu, and JJangah?” Taeyeon said when she was close enough. Jungah seemed to be taken by surprise because she almost jumped, which only made Taeyeon laugh more.

“Unnie, you’re here already! I didn’t see you coming!” The taller girl said, flashing Taeyeon one of her bright smiles. She stopped halfway, though, her eyes raking over Taeyeon’s face and body like they had done the last time. Taeyeon saw her swallow, and she had to fight the urge to smirk, knowing that the extra effort she had put into her appearance had been rewarded. “You look amazing.”

Taeyeon smiled, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Thanks… I was just going for ‘pretty’, so I’m glad you think so.” She said, jokingly, and Jungah laughed. “You too, though. You look… Very, very nice. Really. I don’t think I have ever seen you wearing anything other than your uniform, though.”

“On Friday night you did,” Jungah said with a chuckle. “You don’t remember cause you were drunk, but I changed clothes before we left.”

“Oh, really?” Taeyeon gasped, “Seriously? I guess I really don’t remember.”

“That’s a shame,” Jungah said, clicking her tongue, “You told me my ass looked great in my jeans.”

Taeyeon’s eyes widened, but then she laughed again, only a tiny bit embarrassed. It sounded like something she would say when drunk. “Holy shit, I did?! I don’t remember!”

“It was when we were walking to my truck- Baekhee-unnie couldn’t stop laughing!” Jungah said, clearly amused. Her smile was so wide that her droopy eyes had gotten a little wrinkly. “But don’t worry - I can wear them again soon, while you’re sober, so you can tell me what you honestly think.”

Taeyeon laughed.

“I think my sober-self would agree with my drunk-self, but okay,” she told the younger girl. Then she crouched so she could scratch the head of one of Jungah’s dogs that was sniffing her. All three dogs -all of them fluffy poodles- had been sniffing and waving their tails excitedly at Taeyeon after she had appeared, and they hadn’t stopped as the two girls talked to each other, eager to get going.

“So, where are we going?” Taeyeon asked as she stood up again.

“Just the beach,” Jungah replied, “but not this one- I know another beach not too far away. It has almost no people, and you can actually see the sunset on the sea since it’s on the other side of the island.”

According to Jungah, they just had to follow the main road for about thirty minutes before turning right on a dirt road. The road was beautiful - just a few minutes later, the buildings were replaced by trees, and even though there were houses and shops every now and then, they weren’t too big and they blended in with the landscape without disrupting it.

Taeyeon walked with Jjanggu and Jjangah (the smaller, calmer dogs), while Jungah walked with Monggu (the biggest and most energetic of the three), and the entire time they spent walking on the main road they talked and joked and laughed and sang out loud to songs they both liked.

Before Taeyeon knew it, they were turning right on a narrow dirt road that went downhill. It wasn’t too steep, something Taeyeon was thankful for since the sandals she was wearing weren’t too suitable for hiking.

They made it to the beach not too long after, and Taeyeon could see why Jungah preferred to go there.

It was completely devoid of people; instead of a road lined with buildings, there were hills and a forest surrounding it, and instead of cars and people, she could only hear the waves and the cicadas. There were islands in the horizon, not too far away, but since the beach faced the west they would still be able to watch the sunset if they wanted to and if they stayed long enough. The sand was soft, warm, and although there were lots of logs and sticks littered around the beach, the area closest to the shore was pretty much clear.

“Wow, it’s gorgeous here…!” Taeyeon exclaimed as she looked around, unable to stop herself. She saw Jungah removing the leash from Monggu’s collar, so she crouched to be able to do the same with Jjanggu and Jjangah. “Is it okay to remove their leashes?”

“Yeah,” Jungah replied, “they know this place as well as I do, they know they shouldn’t go too far away… And what’s the point keeping them on a leash in the first place? The idea is for them to run around and have fun, after all… Hey, are you hungry? I brought some snacks.”

Jungah had brought a backpack with her, and after they had found a nice spot near the shore, she took out a beach towel they could sit on, as well as a few bags of chips and cookies.

“You sure came well prepared,” Taeyeon pointed out as she fixed her dress, pulling it lower on her thighs as she sat on the towel with her legs crossed. The dogs were just a few meters in front of them, playing with a stick they had found on the beach, and since Jungah didn’t seem too worried about what they were doing, Taeyeon let herself relax as well.

“I like spending time here,” Jungah explained, wasting no time to open a bag of chips, “but there are no shops nearby, and I get hungry often.”

“Oh, I can relate to that,” Taeyeon told the younger, smiling at her as she took a few chips from the bag she was being offered.

They didn’t speak much at first.

For a long time, there was just a comfortable silence that was actually far from being quiet. The sound of the waves filled almost every empty space, but there was also the squawking of seagulls, the crunching of the sand beneath the paws of Jungah’s dogs, and also the sound of Taeyeon’s own chewing as they devoured the bag of chips.

Their hands touched inside of the bag from time to time, and whenever that happened Taeyeon couldn’t help but smile - the mere contact of her hand against Jungah’s was enough to send a pleasant kind of warmth through her nervous system that spread all over her body, and by the furtive smiles that Jungah gave her whenever it happened, Taeyeon supposed that she wasn’t the only one.

It was weird and exciting, a feeling she had once known too well but that felt almost new.

Taeyeon couldn’t remember the last time she had felt a kind of rush when a person touched her by accident, or when a person smiled in her direction. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt equal parts nervous and at ease in the presence of somebody else.

She supposed it had been back when she and Minho had only just gotten together.

They had met through Jinki, who had gotten a minor in communications. Minho was a communications major. They met in some class they had in common and quickly befriended each other. Taeyeon and he had flirted drunkenly during Jinki’s twenty-third birthday party, eight years before, but Taeyeon was only nineteen and she had been dating a pretty girl from her class called Soojung. It wasn’t until two years later, during the summer of her last year in college, that she and Minho had finally started dating after months and months of intense mutual flirting.

It had been amazing, and during the first stages of their relationship Taeyeon had felt like she could catch on fire whenever Minho did as little as look in her direction. Every touch and every kiss had Taeyeon craving for more, feeling like she would never get enough.

But a flame can only burn so bright for so long, and eventually the relationship changed. With the years, the love she felt for Minho changed, though not in a bad way.

The love was still there, but it had transformed into something that ran deeper, something more certain.

The thrill of the first couple of years was replaced by familiarity. After moving in together, three years into their relationship, Taeyeon felt like there was no inch of Minho’s body, of Minho’s closet, of Minho’s laundry, of Minho’s brain, of Minho’s heart that she didn’t know, and she had also felt the certainty that she could love all of him forever.

But something had gone awfully wrong.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Jungah asked her, all of a sudden, bringing her out of her head and back to the real world.

Taeyeon turned her head to look at the other girl and she saw her looking at her with curiosity.

“Why do you ask?” Taeyeon inquired, letting her eyes meet Jungah’s.

The black-haired girl clicked her tongue. “You were looking at the sea, but you weren’t really looking at it. You seemed a little gone for a moment…” Jungah said, and Taeyeon’s breath caught in her throat when the girl next to her reached forward to push a strand of long brown hair behind her shoulder.

“I just… I just have many things inside my head,” Taeyeon replied, watching as Jungah kept her hand there, on her shoulder, her fingers playing idly with her hair.

“Do you want to talk about them?” Jungah asked, her lips quirking in a little smile. “I know we only just met, so I understand if you don’t want to talk.”

Taeyeon sighed softly, looking away from the other girl and at the ocean again. She uncrossed her legs and stretched them instead, dipping her toes in the sand. Her legs weren’t pretty, not really. They were a dancer’s legs. There were bruises and old scars all over them, and the muscles of her thighs and calves were far from soft. She chanced a look at Jungah’s own legs, stretched not too far away from her own, and she noticed there were no bruises marring her caramel skin.

“I was going to get married six months from now,” Taeyeon said, deciding to close her eyes, her voice steadier than she had thought it would be. “I was going to get married to the person I had been with for the past five years, but something happened in the last few months. I didn’t see it, though. All I could see was how satisfied I was with what we had achieved so far. We had started living together two years before, and he proposed to me only last December. I was happy. Though mostly, I was comfortable. We had a house, he had a car he used to pick me up from work a few times a week, we had talked about having a family. Then, all of a sudden I found out that he was cheating on me in my own house with some co-worker of his,” she couldn’t help but frown at her own words. “So, I left him.”

Jungah didn’t say anything, and Taeyeon didn’t open her eyes to see whether she was looking at her and listening or not. But the younger girl’s hand was still on her shoulder, her palm now pressed more intently against her skin and not just giving lingering touches to her hair. It was comforting and warm, and it was all Taeyeon needed to know that she was listening.

“I don’t know how I did it, actually,” Taeyeon confessed. “I just… I just went and did the things I knew I should, tried not to think much about anything, because if I stopped to think, then it would be over. I was… Paralyzed. Emotionally paralyzed. I went back to my parents’ place and decided to stay there until I found a new place to live and start everything over, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel. I often found myself wishing that I had never opened my mouth and confronted him because that had sent everything I had known for years down the toilet.”

Jungah hummed softly, and Taeyeon noticed that her fingers never stopped stroking her shoulder in a soothing manner.

“Oh, shit, Taeyeon-ah, I’m so sorry… I had no idea you had gone through something like this…” the younger girl said, her voice soft, almost shy. “Do you still love him?”

Taeyeon frowned. Until then, she hadn’t dared ask herself that question, but for some reason it didn’t sound offensive when it came from Jungah’s mouth. It took her a while to reply - how many seconds or minutes went by, Taeyeon wasn’t sure.

“I hate him,” she said, finally. “I hate him for being stupid enough to forget about what took us years to build. You know, it doesn’t matter if a person has been honest to you all along - all it takes is one lie for trust to crumble down. It’s a turning point. Suddenly you start to wonder if everything that came before the lie was actually real, and what’s worse, you find it hard to believe that there could ever be future in common with that person, because now you know they think you’re stupid enough to be fooled. And the worst thing is that I was stupid enough because he managed to fool me in my own house for who knows how long, and still I wished that I would’ve shut up and pretended I hadn’t found out…”

“You know, you did the right thing,” Jungah said, sounding less insecure than before, her voice firmer. “I can’t imagine how hard it must have been…”

Taeyeon finally turned her head and opened her eyes to be able to look at Jungah.

“I think I did the right thing too, and I hate him, but I still miss him, I guess,” Taeyeon admitted quietly. Her voice broke, and she could feel a lump in her chest, pressing on her heart almost painfully. It distracted her from the tears that had gathered on the corners of her eyes, but it didn’t stop them from falling; eventually; slowly. She sniffled and groaned, and after looking away again she rubbed her wrist against her eyes to clean her tears. “Shit, I’m sorry…”

“Oh, no, Taeyeon-ah,” Jungah said, a hint of panic in her voice that was also evident in the way she had completely forgone formalities. She moved closer to Taeyeon and wrapped her arm around her shoulders, and with her free hand she pushed her hair out of the way. “Hey, it’s okay to cry. It’s good to cry, you know? Please, please don’t stop yourself from crying.”

Taeyeon shook her head weakly, and she tried to push the younger girl away, but she didn’t have the strength to fight. She didn’t have the will to fight, either. Jungah’s arm around her was steady and sure, warm and safe, and it only made more tears reach her eyes.

“It’s so unfair to you…” Jungah went on, her hand rubbing Taeyeon’s arm up and down. “So scary, right? When suddenly everything you know turns into ruins and you have to start over… It’s scary. But you’re not alone in this. You have your friends, you have your family, and it might not sound like much, but you have me.”

Taeyeon couldn’t help but chuckle at that - it was a wet chuckle, but it wasn’t badly-intentioned. She had met Jungah roughly ten days ago in a bar, and now she was crying on her shoulder, opening her heart to her and telling her about her problems, and Jungah was there willingly, assuring her that she was there for her.

“It’s true,” Jungah insisted, probably misinterpreting Taeyeon’s chuckle of disbelief. She went on stroking her hair and the side of her face, the sides of her fingers running almost delicately over Taeyeon’s wet cheeks. “I am here. Do you think I couldn’t tell by the first time we saw each other that you were carrying some heavy emotional luggage with you? It was written all over your face, all over your eyes, and the more we talked in the bar, the more I wanted to get to know you. You intrigued me from the first time I saw you, and not much time has passed since then, but shit, I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy. So, I’m willing to be here for you for as long as you’re here in Yeosu, or for as long as you want me to. I told you I would be your friend, so I’ll be your friend.”

Taeyeon reached for Jungah’s hand that was stroking her arm and she intertwined their fingers, the younger’s words resounding in her head.

They gave her peace - Jungah gave her peace. But at the same time, she managed to stir a thousand questions inside of her. There was something about her that pulled her in and made her feel at ease, but at the same time it had her skin tingling with electricity. An undeniable magnetism that made Taeyeon want to stay in Jungah’s orbit and listen to her, watch her, reveal herself to her, learn more about her.

“So, that’s more or less my story,” Taeyeon resumed, feeling more sobered up after spilling a few tears. Her nose was still runny, and her voice was still a little shaky, but she felt strangely light - as if she had already put the worst thing out there. What remained to say wasn’t so hard. “I was so out of it that I couldn’t focus in my job…”

“In the dance academy, right?” Jungah asked, and Taeyeon nodded.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I wasn’t really there, you know? So, my best friend and partner in the academy, Kibum… He and his boyfriend insisted that I took a break from everything and come here to get a breath of fresh air, or whatever.”

“Like a catharsis,” Jungah supplied. “Yeah, I get it… And, has it helped?”

Taeyeon hummed thoughtfully.

She supposed it had.

It had been ten days since she first arrived to Yeosu and she had already cried on more occasions than she had the entire month she spent in Seoul after breaking up. She had a long way to get there, she supposed, and she wasn’t expecting everything to get magically fixed with a single trip to the seaside, but the change of scenery was definitely helping her heal.

Falling asleep to the sound of the ocean; waking up to Jinki’s and Sunyoung’s voices chatting and bickering in the kitchen; spending most of her days exploring and getting lost in a new city, walking endlessly down unfamiliar streets or by the sea; going to The Wave and meeting Jungah and Baekhee, chatting her life away until ungodly hours of the night.

No crowded subway, no cars honking in the street outside her parents’ house, no thinking about finding a place to live, no routine, no nothing. At least, not in the meantime.

“It has,” Taeyeon answered, finally. “It definitely has.”

“I’m glad,” Jungah said, and she sounded honest. Taeyeon turned her face to look at her and she saw that she was smiling, gently. Her arm was still wrapped around her shoulder, and Taeyeon was still holding her hand and refusing to let go. At some point their knees had knocked against each other’s, too, and Jungah’s puppies were curled up on the towel next to their owner.

“Last night you asked me about my pendant, do you remember?” Jungah said, suddenly, a little hesitantly, like she was testing the waters. Taeyeon nodded. She did remember, but for some reason it felt like it had been a long time ago and not just the night before.

“Yeah, you said that you used to dance, but that you had stopped…” Taeyeon said, recalling their conversation they had had the night before. She had only been a little bit buzzed with alcohol - only to the point where her hands were braver and her tongue more reckless, not bothering to filter all her thoughts.

Jungah nodded, and then it was her turn to look into the distance. Taeyeon watched her, saw her dark eyes focus on something she couldn’t see, maybe on the ocean, maybe on the sky, maybe nowhere in particular. She retrieved her arm from around Taeyeon’s shoulders, but Taeyeon didn’t let go of her - instead, she linked their arms together and held her hand.

“I was going to be amazing,” Jungah began, “I started learning ballet when I was six years old, right here in Yeosu, and I fell in love with it. I didn’t really care about school so my grades were never the best, but I excelled in dancing. It was all I thought about. When I was in high school, my father got relocated so my family moved to Daegu. I know Daegu is no Seoul, but it’s still a big city compared to Yeosu, especially back then, and it opened my eyes to the world. I started dreaming big because I could. As young as I was, I got noticed by important names of the ballet world.”

Jungah paused for a moment, but Taeyeon didn’t push her. It sounded incredible, really - very similar to how she had wanted her life to be when she was young. She, too, had been a prodigy, or so she had been told. With a face like hers and moving the way she moved, she could have gone into the entertainment business and become an idol, but her parents hadn’t approved of it. She was thankful that she had been able to keep on dancing, though, since it was the thing that made her the happiest. In the academy she had with Kibum, she thought she saw tiny versions of herself every day, and it made her happy to feel like she was contributing in some way to their own dreams.

But the chance that Jungah was given to live as a performer… Taeyeon would have taken that any day if she could. But in the end Jungah was there, sitting next to her on a lost beach in one of Yeosu’s many islands. She was working in a bar in Yeosu instead of performing in front of thousands of people. Why.

Jungah licked her lips once before resuming her tale, and she reached with her free hand to stroke the head of the dog that was closest to hers. “When I was seventeen I was offered a scholarship in the best ballet academy of Seoul, but my father insisted that I finished high school in Daegu first... It made sense. Now I know it was the logical thing - if I went to Seoul I would be all by myself, very far from my parents’ radar, living by myself at a really young age… I was obviously against the idea of staying in Daegu, though. I wanted to get my life as a professional dancer started as soon as possible, after all.”

“Oh… So, you lost your chance…?” Taeyeon asked, unsure. She suspected it would take a lot more to make Jungah stop dancing. Her own reluctant parents hadn’t stopped her, and she had the impression that Jungah and she were similar in that aspect. “What happened?”

Jungah shook her head, a little sad smile on her lips. “No, they told me they were willing to wait until I graduated high school. I only had one year to go, after all, and as long as I didn’t stop dancing during that year they could accept me for the following year. No, what happened was… Just a few months before high school was over, I was in a bad car accident with my mother. She was driving me to ballet class and we were arguing about something -something stupid, most likely-, and when she was turning left on an intersection, another car hit us full speed from the side where I was sitting.”

Taeyeon gasped and her jaw fell with the surprise. “What…?! Oh, shit, Jungah…! I would have never guessed…!”

Jungah shook her head. “It’s okay… I’m all okay, now. But back then I wasn’t. Nothing too bad happened to my mom, thankfully, but my body was injured pretty badly. My right leg was severely fractured, my right arm, and my ribs, too… The force of the impact gave me a severe concussion as it sent my head banging against my mother’s seat, but the worst thing was my pelvis.”

Taeyeon frowned as she tried to imagine the pain Jungah must have gone through. The physical pain was one thing, but Taeyeon knew that what followed the actual accident had been the worst, most difficult part. She squeezed Jungah’s hand in a comforting gesture.

“Unsurprisingly, my recovery was going to take a long while,” Jungah went on, squeezing Taeyeon’s hand right back. “I couldn’t participate in any of the dance presentations of the end of the year because I couldn’t even walk. Hell, I couldn’t even write or eat properly for a long time, how could I expect to dance? I felt so useless… The academies forgot about me - surely they found someone to replace me soon enough, and they couldn’t wait longer for a person who had been told wouldn’t be able to dance again, at least not until a year and a half later.”

“So… You never danced again?” Taeyeon asked, and Jungah shook her head

“No, never again. I was always told it was a miracle that I was even alive after such a big accident, but for the longest time I couldn’t see the point in living if I couldn’t dance…” Jungah admitted, her voice soft, and Taeyeon almost felt her pain inside of her. She squeezed her hand again and moved closer, hoping to transmit Jungah all the warmth and support she could - all the support she wishes she could have given her during those darker years, had they met each other sooner. Jungah took a deep breath.

“The year after the accident, when I was nineteen, I decided I wanted to come back to Yeosu by myself. I had had enough of Daegu and I had grown to hate it for destroying my dreams, for destroying my body, so I started living with my grandparents here. I got in touch again with Baekhee-unnie once again - we had been neighbors; good childhood friends despite our age difference. She was halfway through her career when she had to come back. The next year she and her brother opened The Wave, and she offered me a job there even though I was not only inexperienced, but also still on the way to complete recovery, and depressed as fuck. I’ve been there ever since. I haven’t gone back to dancing, but I’m not bitter about it anymore.”

The way she said it sounded honest, and when Taeyeon looked at her she saw that it was. Her face seemed serene, her attitude was calm.

“Are you happy?” Taeyeon asked, softly, and Jungah chuckled, shrugging.

“I am happy right now,” she replied. “I was happy yesterday, and the day before that. I miss dancing, but also… It’s too late for that. I haven’t danced in seven years. My body is okay now, but I don’t know… I feel like my chance already passed. Maybe it just wasn’t the thing for me, after all…”

“And bartending is…?” Taeyeon asked, raising a curious eyebrow at Jungah. “You can go back to dancing anytime, you know…? Maybe things won’t be the same as they were before, maybe you won’t rule the stages anymore, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up completely on the thing you love.”

“I don’t know,” Jungah said, “it really has been so, so long…”

“You think you forgot how to do it?” Taeyeon asked her, looking down at their clasped hands for a brief moment before looking up at Jungah’s face again. There was that pull again, the magnetic aura in Jungah that ran like electricity through Taeyeon’s nerves, and she couldn’t help but take her hand to stroke Jungah’s face the way she had done with her before.

Jungah closed her eyes and nodded.

“In that case…” Taeyeon started, running her fingertips over Jungah’s cheekbone, following the trace of freckles that the sun of the seaside had given her in time. “I can teach you, at least until you remember.”

The younger girl sighed and shook her head after a short moment. Her eyes had been fixed on Taeyeon’s, but the movement of her head interrupted their gaze, and it also had Taeyeon retrieving her hand.

“No, I think… I think I would rather not go back to any of that. It’s in the past for a reason,” she said, and even though she didn’t sound very convinced, Taeyeon didn’t try to insist.

She pulled back a few centimeters. “Okay. It’s okay, I understand.” She squeezed Jungah’s hand one last time, and they shared one last smile.

Part 3